Tag: Bot nuke

Incoming Bot Nuke: March 2012


Jacmob is the creator of RSBuddy, one of the major bots back in the day. Why is he important? Following the bot nuke, and the shuttering of RSBuddy, Jacmob was hired by Jagex to work on anti-bot solutions. In a post on the RSBuddy forums, Jacmob talks about an upcoming March 2012 bot nuke:

It’s been a while since that preliminary bot nuke last October. Now that there’s been time for competent people to move on and various arrangements to be made, I will soon be making my final announcement on RSBuddy. In particular I will speak about the end of RSBuddy and what the approach will be to any further related projects. I will also speak in general terms about the larger bot nuke that’s due in shortly, which should encompass every type of bot and conclude the development time needed to deal with bots for a long while.

Hopefully there will be more details soon.

Jagex Unveils ‘Optimus’ Anti-Bot Technology


I don’t think I’ve used that screenshot in almost two years. Last October, Jagex accomplished what many of us had thought to be impossible: busted a grand majority of the bots in RuneScape in one single move known today as Bot Nuke Day, or Project Clusterfutterer. The update demolished reflection and injection bots, or 98% of the bot community according to Jagex’s estimations, and has proven to be successful enough that 40% of the player base was banned within the following month.

On the main RuneScape website, Jagex is enjoying their recent major victory over a major bot writer in a recently settled case, and they announced plans for even more bot eradication, this time focusing on the more basic bots that auto-click or search the screen for specific colors.

We remain committed to our ongoing work to ensure that the successes of Bot Nuke Day are never undone by staying a few steps ahead in the arms race with the remaining bot developers and gold farmers. We’re already well underway with our next generation of anti-botting software called Optimus, which is going to be released shortly, and we’re also currently developing ways to remove the remaining screen-scraper bots from the game. We’ll also be continuing to fight gold-farmers on every front.

Jagex has done quite a bit over the past months to completely rid their game of cheaters and scam artists, from the bot nuke back in October to the removal of popular gambling tools. With the upcoming Stellar Dawn and Transformers Online, Jagex losing their reputation as saturated with cheaters can only boost the game’s receptions.

Jagex Unveils 'Optimus' Anti-Bot Technology


I don’t think I’ve used that screenshot in almost two years. Last October, Jagex accomplished what many of us had thought to be impossible: busted a grand majority of the bots in RuneScape in one single move known today as Bot Nuke Day, or Project Clusterfutterer. The update demolished reflection and injection bots, or 98% of the bot community according to Jagex’s estimations, and has proven to be successful enough that 40% of the player base was banned within the following month.

On the main RuneScape website, Jagex is enjoying their recent major victory over a major bot writer in a recently settled case, and they announced plans for even more bot eradication, this time focusing on the more basic bots that auto-click or search the screen for specific colors.

We remain committed to our ongoing work to ensure that the successes of Bot Nuke Day are never undone by staying a few steps ahead in the arms race with the remaining bot developers and gold farmers. We’re already well underway with our next generation of anti-botting software called Optimus, which is going to be released shortly, and we’re also currently developing ways to remove the remaining screen-scraper bots from the game. We’ll also be continuing to fight gold-farmers on every front.

Jagex has done quite a bit over the past months to completely rid their game of cheaters and scam artists, from the bot nuke back in October to the removal of popular gambling tools. With the upcoming Stellar Dawn and Transformers Online, Jagex losing their reputation as saturated with cheaters can only boost the game’s receptions.

Most Surprising Act of 2011: Runescape Nukes Cheaters


Ever since Jagex’s inception, their fight against bots has been rather reactionary and ineffective. From 2001 with CAPTCHA codes and fatigue, to the random event system that probably claimed more players who had left the keyboard or lost connection than their intended targets, and so on. From 2005 onward, Jagex continued updates on an escalating basis to combat gold farmers who, despite massive bans and the shut down of Runescape classic to all but a few, continued growing at an even larger scale. In 2007, Jagex restricted trade to small imbalances, implemented the anonymous trading of the Grand Exchange. For over three years, Jagex implemented updates to soften those restrictions, and in 2011 all of that work went to waste when Jagex released the restrictions on trade and the gold farmers came back in an even greater force than they had four years prior.

So when Jagex launched the bot nuke and knocked the servers offline for the better part of the day, I joined a few other MMO journalists in awaiting the results, and were we ever surprised. Even after waiting for a couple of days, the bots hadn’t come back. The chatter on the cheat websites was of panic, and despite the attempt to keep their customers, the bot writers only seemed to be able to make big announcements of further upcoming announcements.

Bots still exist, don’t get confused, but those that continue on have nowhere near the complexity of their deceased brethren. Writing a bot that can click on specific sections of the screen in a specific order is easier to defeat than a bot that can fight dragons more efficiently than I can. So after years of telling myself that Jagex would never get rid of the bots due to a combination of incompetence and apathy, I can say that this year Jagex not only made me eat my shoe, but made me eat it dry.

Kudos to you, Jagex.

Runescape: No Longer Housing Bots, Consolidates Servers


As I’m sure many of you are tired of hearing by now, Jagex dropped a bomb on its own game when they released an update that not only began banning bots at a rate of 9000 per minute (their figure, not mine), but also rendered the programs useless by gutting their core programming. When the dust cleared and the cheaters were gone, however, the impact of Jagex’s update became readily apparent, in the form of a 60% drop in player activity. Where 90% of the users removed were free players, according to Jagex, only 10% were paying members.

Breaking the bots caused an expected drop in free-playing activity due to millions of gold farmers no longer being in the game, so we have removed a number of free game worlds. While we were at it, we also made a smaller amount of changes to the member worlds, which will make grouping for popular in–game activities as easy as possible.

Unfortunately this has left the worlds a little sparse, and to make up for it Jagex has shut down around 30 servers today to consolidate players, from 172 down to 139. You can read the entire announcement here.

Jagex: Nuking Bots, Suing Cheaters, Sends Official Warning


Yesterday was bot nuking day at Runescape, and according to Jagex it has been an overwhelming success not just in cleaning up the game, but disabling 98% of the bots and gold farmers. Something has come to my attention from another player about receiving an email claiming to be from Jagex, offering amnesty and a last chance if the user no longer cheated. If the player continued botting, however, the email threatened to add their name to a list of defendants in Jagex Vs John Does, a pending lawsuit in the District Court in California.

The email is real, as Jagex confirmed on their forums. Check it out below:

Dear Player,

We have strong evidence that you may have purchased and used botting software in the past, specifically ibot software.

Botting and the cheating it brings is destroying your game, violates Jagex’s rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and any player that continues to engage in botting activity has no place in our community.

As part of bot nuke week we are offering you a 1 time amnesty and settlement lifeline, which is a chance to reform and change your ways. We’d like you to contribute to the community in a positive way, to compete on a level playing field as everyone else does and play in the true spirit of the game, with integrity. All of your accounts, main and otherwise, are now on our watch list and will be monitored for the use of ibot and all other inappropriate third-party software. Regardless of who you are or how long you’ve been with us, if you decide to cheat and bot ever again we will have no hesitation in: (1) permanently removing your account from our wonderful community in order to protect Jagex’s rights under the DMCA, and (2) naming you as a defendant in Jagex Limited v. John Does, which is a lawsuit based on DMCA violations that is currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California (Civ. Action No. SACV11-00969-CJC).

Please note that this amnesty and settlement offer is protected under Fed. R. Evid. 408. If you ignore our offer and instead continue use botting software, we reserve our rights to pursue statutory damages against you for between $200 to $2,500 per act of past, present, and/or future botting in accordance with 17 U.S.C. 1203(c)(3).

We do hope you make the morally sound and lawful choice of turning your back on bots. We look forward to seeing you in game having fun in a way that is true to the spirit of fair play and respectful to your fellow players.

Yours sincerely,
Mark Gerhard

You can find the thread confirming this at: 14-15-831-63310676 (Enter this into the “jump to thread” form on the forums itself). But wait! There’s more! Mark Gerhard promises yet another update today in Project Clusterfutterer (they’re going to keep making me say that, aren’t they?) with more updates later this week to combat the remaining 2%.